Guardrails for Agentic Data Access

If it’s October, then it’s Big Data Week in Bucharest, which means it’s time for our annual BDW meetup. This year the evening is powered by Cloudera and supported by AWS. We’re staying close to the conference’s data and AI thread, with talks from eMAG and AWS on the architecture behind agentic access to enterprise data, without breaking the security model.

**Meetup RSVP is not enough to get in. You also need to register on the Cloudera event page — that’s what actually secures your spot. A Big Data Week Conference ticket is not required.**

Putting an AI agent in front of your data is the easy part. The hard part is everything underneath: who the agent is, what it can reach, what happens when it decides to act, and what stops it when the model gets it wrong. Georgiana Conete and Mihai Rez walk through eMAG's Cloudera platform and the MCP layer that lets users query Impala in natural language without stepping outside the permissions already enforced. Radu Dobrinescu then maps the layers that make agent autonomy defensible — least-privilege identity, gateway authorization, human approval on destructive actions, guardrails, and audit — each to a real failure it prevents.

What’s on the Agenda?
18:00 – 18:30 | Doors Open
Grab a drink, grab a seat, and connect with other attendees.
18:30 – 19:30 | Lightning Talks
Georgiana Conete & Mihai Rez – Building a Governed AI Gateway to Enterprise Data
Radu Dobrinescu – Don’t Trust the Model: Securing Agents That Act on Your Data
Third talk is yours – community slot, open until 25 September (see below)
19:30 – 21:00 | Food, Drinks & Networking
Stick around for pizza, cold drinks, and open-ended technical discussions.

The third talk belongs to the community.
We kept the last talk open, and we'd love to fill it from this group. eMAG will show how a platform team built this; Radu will show how it's meant to be secured. The third talk should come from wherever you actually sit:

• how you connected a model to a live database without changing existing permissions
• what you learned from building an MCP layer, or why you chose not to
• a time an agent did something wrong and how you fixed it
• how you manage identity, approvals, and audits for AI agents
• a guardrail that looked useful but didn’t actually work
• how much it all cost

Fifteen minutes on stage plus five for questions. Send a title and a few lines on what you did to [hello@bigdataweek.com](mailto:hello@bigdataweek.com) by Thursday, September 25 .
The slot comes with a full Big Data Week conference pass, two guest passes, and the stage alongside Georgiana, Mihai, and Radu.

This is an in-person event; presentations will be conducted in English.
See you there — and don’t skip the Cloudera registration; Meetup alone won’t hold your seat.

PS: If you didn't get your Big Data Week tickets yet, we have a 25% community discount: BDW26COMM25.